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Third Party Web Apps And Plug-ins

Posted on Friday, 12th March 2010 - 11:28 am by Refresh Creations Ltd

Add This, Add That, Place our Badge on your Blog for enhanced traffic reporting, Google Anal...what? With so many third party plug-ins available to website designers nowadays I thought it best to weigh up the advantages and disadvantages of using these handy website plug-ins.

Advantages of using 3rd Party plug-ins

Many offer specialist functionality, which can be replicated across any site on the internet. Saving you the trouble of spending a large number of hours coding away to replicate the same feat. A personal favourite tool I`ve been using on more recent sites is the "Add This" button after being recommended by Matt from Creative SEO a while ago. This particular tool allows users to quickly bookmark your web-page to either their browsers bookmark list or countless social networking sites. It`s still being updated with new sites today.

To code and maintain such a tool on your own would just be a pain in the ass! Thank goodness someone has done this for us all to use already. An alternative would be to simply use a couple of the main social networking sites and spread them across the site which would be fairly useful anyway although nowhere near as complete a service.

Most tools i`ve come across are designed to be as easy to use as possible, and can even be customized to fit the look of your site, catering for different background colors, custom images or just plain text.

Well designed tools will degrade nicely with a variety of browsers being used, sure they may not display correctly( or maybe not at all) in old browsers or some mobile phones but the tools are only meant for extra functionality, not to be used as the backbone of your websites content (content is, after all, KING)

Even when tools aren`t overly customisable such as a Facebook badge. It`s going to be a simple way of adding functionality without diving into code to a great extent.

Possible disadvantages of 3rd party plug-ins

It`s not all blue skies, shining suns and a nice beach party maybe afterwards. Whilst I doubt much of this applies for the short term it may be handy if you notice oddities on your website(s).

If the third party plug-ins are made unreliable due to server downtime or unexpectedly large amounts of traffic, the plug-in could slow your site down to a crawl. Most tools rely heavily on Javascript / jQuery as their backbone for working. Using lots of tools on a website can cause a significant delay in page loading times.

Not too much of a problem provided you utilize methods to improve the speed of your website, the Page Speed Tool from Google and Yahoo`s aptly named YSlow are great plug-ins for Firefox which indicate page loading times and displaying areas where your site can improve.

Not all plug-ins are compatible with SSL encryption.

Particularly noticeable in the case of e-commerce sites. This can be a real pain to figure out sometimes, checking the stylesheet, code modules all reference images, javascript, etc correctly, only to find the handy plug-in you`ve added to the site needs to be removed or altered in certain cases. This can usually be prevented through some nice PHP / ASP to check which port your website is using (443 (SSL) or 80 (Unencrypted)) but can prove to be an annoyance.

Some tools, most noticeably the Google Analytics Tracker run nicely in both secure and unsecure environments (Google Analytics even offering asynchronous loading with the loading of the webpage) without causing the dreaded "unsecure elements are being displayed on this page" notification to pop-up and scare users away from your secure area / shopping cart. I really wish this was available with the popular "Add This" service. That and perhaps better debugging in browsers when this occurs would help matters out.

To summarize, third party tools are largely a blessing for your site, just don`t rely too heavily upon them., particularly if page loading times are an issue. If they drop out all of a sudden, visit the makers website to check if it`s still available or perhaps requires an updated code.

I`ve listed a couple of my favourites in this article and below. They`re all FREE which is even better! If you can recommend any others, either contact me via Twitter or e-mail me directly at ryan@refreshcreations.co.uk

Google Analytics - Simply a must for every website, makes tracking visitors and analysing your sites progress really easy.
Google Webmaster Tools - Added by simply uploading a verification File / adding a small meta tag. This works well in tandem with analytics for tracking your websites SERPs, checking for malware, geo-targeting your website and is regularly having new features added to it.
Page Speed - A great Firefox plug-in for web developers. Advises you on changes to make and even, essentially makes some changes for you in terms of saving images in smaller formats, etc.
YSlow - Another tool for analysing loading times of your website.
Add This - As explained in the article, a great, customisable, social bookmarking tool.